FREE: WENDE MUSEUM EXHIBIT OPENINGS TOUR & ARTIST TALKS

CROSS-POSTED WITH SO CAL EXPLORERS

Curator guided tour of 2 new exhibits, followed by artist talks. Free event. We've been to several of their events, and they are always very good. The Wende focuses on art related to the Cold War and the post-WWII period, including de-colonization.

Date: Saturday, November 8, 11:00 AM to 3:30 PM

Venue: Wende Museum
10808 Culver Boulevard,. Culver City, CA 90230
info@wendemuseum.org 310-216-1600

Free but you must RSVP here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/wende-museum-fall-2025-exhibitions-opening-day-tickets-1805540503249

Let's attend the opening of two new exhibits, with a guided tour and artist talks.

11:30 am meet in front of the museum, then explore the exhibits and permanent collection (on the sides).
12:00 pm curator-led tour of the new exhibits
2:00 pm artist talks in the Gazebo

Exhibits:

Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant

Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana

The Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and archive that preserves history and brings it to life through exhibitions, scholarship, education, and community engagement.

Wende is a German word meaning “turning point” or “change” that has come to describe the transformative period around the fall of the Berlin Wall. Founded in 2002, the Wende Museum holds an unparalleled collection of art and artifacts from the Cold War era, which serves as a foundation for programs that illuminate the political and cultural changes of the past, offer opportunities to make sense of a changing present, and inspire active participation in the personal and social changes that will shape the future.

Visitor information: https://wendemuseum.org/visit-the-wende/

About the exhibits:

Enrique Martínez Celaya: The Sextant
Between 1957 and 1963, the artist’s father built a modernist house in a small coastal village in Cuba. The time period spanned the Cuban Revolution, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the United States embargo against Cuba, a political context that in various ways reflected the story of the house. This house, in which Martínez Celaya’s family waited for exile, now serves as an official wedding venue, carrying with it the contradictions and the scars of the Communist Revolution and its aftermath.

The installation The Sextant is a smaller-scale recreation of the house, which will serve as an embodiment of the cultural, architectural, and emotional responses to the Cold War in the Caribbean. The aspect of recreation, re-staging, and artifice of the installation is critically meaningful. The model of the house shines a light on the question of authenticity as well as the gap between what is reality and what is a dream, and reveals tensions that are present in all our lives but have a particularly profound relevance to the experience of those who lived in communist countries during the Cold War.

Moreover, the installation explores concepts such as the interiority of memory, the self refracted through the experience of home, and the mysterious, painful, and radiant world of childhood. It also investigates the relationship between lived experience and memory, the way a work of art negotiates the distance between witness and participant, and selfhood that is, at least in part, otherness.

Finally, the work explores the intersection of Utopia with everyday concerns, as well as the question how individuals and societies negotiate or absorb the failure of dreams. The installation is both a primary experience and an allegory for the evolution of our hopes and illusions.

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an artist, author, and former physicist whose work has been exhibited and collected by major institutions worldwide. He is Provost Professor of Humanities and Arts at the University of Southern California, and a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College. His work is held in 58 public collections internationally. Martínez Celaya is the author of nine books, including two volumes of his Collected Writings and Interviews, 2010-2017 and 1990-2010. His work has been the subject of 14 monographic publications. He is the founder of Whale & Star, an evolving idea of social interaction and responsibility, whose imprint is internationally recognized for its books in art, poetry, art practice, and critical theory.

Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana
During the 1960s, Accra stood at the center of the anticolonial world. As the capital of Ghana— the first independent country in sub-Saharan Africa following European colonization—the city drew revolutionaries, intellectuals, and artists from across the continent and the Cold War divides. Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, envisioned Accra as a showcase of African statehood and invited architects to help shape its future.

Intersections traces the collaboration of two architects who responded to that call: Ghanaian Victor Adegbite (1925–2014) and Hungarian Charles Polónyi (1928–2002). Polónyi arrived in Accra as part of Eastern European technical assistance programs supporting Ghana’s transition to socialism. He worked for the Ghana National Construction Corporation, where Adegbite—a Howard University graduate—served as chief architect. In their work at the GNCC, they mobilized architectural resources from the socialist, capitalist, and non-aligned countries and designed buildings that responded to Ghana’s needs, means, and aspirations.

The exhibition centers on the housing projects designed by Adegbite and Polónyi, which embodied the many dimensions of independence—from representing a new elite to the state’s provision of housing for all social groups. By juxtaposing family archives from the United States and Hungary—preserved by the architects’ daughters—the exhibition both reconstructs and reenacts an encounter from sixty years ago. By recording how the buildings designed by Adegbite and Polónyi have been appropriated by their inhabitants, it shows how the architects’ work continues to impact Accra’s urban landscapes.

Curators: Michael Dziwornu and Łukasz Stanek, in collaboration with Dana Salama.